Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Christ the King

Although
his time on earth was short, Jesus created quite a stir during his even briefer
ministry( Luke 23:33-43). As a revolutionary he upset Jewish law, tradition and the Roman
hierarchy. He consorted with the most unlikely disenfranchised members of
society and violated conventional decorum. He upset the “purity code” by
proclaiming it wasn’t what went into your mouth that mattered but what came
out. He wasn’t a king, a priest, or a prophet. He performed many miracles that
included healing the sick and bringing the dead back to life. Yet he was unable
to save himself; he was executed with 2 petty criminals. Not very kingly is it?
And to compound the indignity, the soldiers kneel at his feet, not to worship,
but to gamble for his clothes, while deriding his reign as “king of the Jews.” It amused them
because they were Romans and they knew what a real king looked like, and this definitely
was not it. A real king had power and arrogance and this Jesus had none of
that. So they mocked him.

Yet,
for some reason, one of the two thieves also being executed reprimands the
other who derides Jesus’ weakness and speaks with compassion and takes pity on
another condemned man. Then he does an astounding thing and asks “Jesus,
remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Now, where did that come
from? How can he hang there on the cross and look over at a man dying
beside him, and see in him as a savior, a messiah, a king with a kingdom? Somehow,
the second thief got it; he saw what Jesus was doing; he saw that Jesus refused
to swat his oppressors and he died so that they could be forgiven, died so that
by his suffering their suffering would be healed.

We celebrate
Christ the King, not because of his regal bearing, but because of his humility;
not because of his power, but because of his compassion; not because of his
triumph, but because of his travail; not because he fixes our lives, but
because he shows us the way to live.

And what about
this kingdom of God? Where is it? Richard Rohr writes that “if we go to the
depths of anything, we will begin to knock upon something substantial, ‘real’
and with a timeless quality to it. We will move from the starter kit of ‘belief’
to an actual inner knowing. This is most especially true if we have ever loved
deeply; accompanied someone through the mystery of dying, or stood in genuine
life changing awe before mystery time or beauty. This ‘something real’ is what
all the worlds religions were pointing to when they spoke of heaven or the
kingdom of God. They were not wrong at all; their only mistake was that they
pushed it off into the next world. If God’s
Kingdom is later, it is because it is first of all now…In other words, heaven/
/union/ love now emerge from within us much more than from a mere belief system
andas Jesus promises the Samaritan
woman, “the spring within her will well up into eternal life. (John 4:14)”